To create safe and affordable housing for their citizens, city agencies need to see landlords for what they truly are—as, at best, potential predators, if not actual ones. And to act aggressively on that knowledge.  

As Niccolo Machiavelli warned:  

“All those who have written upon civil institutions demonstrate…that whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it. 

“If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself.  But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.”

Niccolo Machiavelli

The vast majority of this nation’s cities and states make no effort to control the insatiable greed of landlords. Nor to require them to provide even minimal habitability for their tenants.

Many tenants have lived with rotting floors, bedbugs, nonworking toilets, mice/rats, chipping lead-based paint and other outrages for not simply months but years. 

This holds true even in San Francisco—the so-called “renters’ paradise” where the District Attorney’s Office hasn’t prosecuted a slumlord in decades. 

Part Two of this series presented a series of badly-needed, long-overdue reforms for the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection (DBI). This is the agency charged with ensuring safe housing conditions for San Francisco residents. 

Renters in cities and states across the country should demand similar protections.

This concluding part will cover the remainder of those needed reforms. 

• Landlords should be required to bring all the units in a building up to existing building codes, and not just those in need of immediate repair.
• Landlords should be legally required to hire a certified-expert contractor to perform building repairs. To save money—that they can well afford to spend—-many landlords insist on making such repairs despite their not being trained or experienced in doing so. They thereby risk the health and/or safety of their tenants. 
• DBI should not view itself as a “mediation” agency between landlords and tenants. Most landlords hate DBI and will always do so. They believe they should be allowed to treat their tenants like serfs, if not slaves, raise extortionate rents anytime they desire, and maintain their buildings in whatever state they wish. 
• Above all, DBI must stop viewing itself as a regulatory agency and start seeing itself as a law enforcement one. The FBI doesn’t ask criminals to comply with the law. It applies whatever amount of pressure is needed to force their compliance. William Tecumseh Sherman, speaking of the rebellious Southern states, said it best: “They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us.”  

• The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office should create a special unit to investigate and  prosecute slumlords. Prosecutors should offer rewards to citizens who provide tips on major outrages by the city’s slumlords.  

• Install Rent Control protections for tenants on fixed incomes. San Francisco is notorious for having the highest rents in the nation. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment runs $3,000 a month. Even those in the vaunted high-tech industry spend most of their income on rent.
• For tenants on fixed incomes—seniors, disabled, students—the predatory greed of landlords amounts to a staged-in eviction notice.  Social Security recipients often don’t get  a cost-of-living increase if there hasn’t been a rise in gasoline prices. But many of them don’t own cars—while the price of everything else—such as groceries—has sharply risen.  
• Allowing landlords to jack up rents to the fullest extent possible every year will eventually drive out all tenants who are not multimillionaires. In fact, an unknown portion of this City’s homeless population doubtless stems from the ability of landlords to gradually raise rents above tenants’ ability to afford them.  
• In 1979, San Franciscans passed a Rent Control law to protect tenants against predatory rent hikes and unfair evictions. As a result, a landlord can only raise a tenant’s rent a certain percentage every year. This is set by the set by the Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board, more popularly known as the “Rent Board.”  
• But there is a gaping hole in the law: Once a tenant moves out, the landlord can jack up the rent as high as he wants. This is why the average rent in San Francisco is priced beyond most middle-class wage-earners. 
• In addition, landlords are allowed to charge tenants yearly fees to maintain the existence of the Rent Board. This is both unfair and insulting, since the Board was created to protect tenants from predatory landlords. Most tenants have far less money to pay such fees than do landlords, who are free to raise rents every year. And landlords—unlike tenants—can and do write off Rent Board fees on their taxes every year. 

As of 2024, only seven states–—California, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon—and the District of Columbia—offer tenant protections via residential rent control.

Currently, 33 states ban local governments from adapting rent regulation laws.  

Only 39 out of 482 cities in California have strong tenant protections.

And only 16 cities in California have rent controls on landlords’ greed: Alameda, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, East Palo Alto, Gardena, Hayward, Los Angeles, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Oakland, Palm Springs, Richmond. San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica and West Hollywood.

A common rule of thumb is to spend no more than 30% of your gross monthly income on housing. Yet a May, 2024 Harvard report states that 22.4 million households in the United States spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and 12.1 million spend more than 50%. 

In New York City and San Francisco, median monthly rents are over $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment.

Housing affordability has become a major political issue, especially as the rising tide of homelessness overwhelms cities and states. The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump has blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the lack of affordable housing.

Yet the insatiable greed of landlords has never been addressed at a federal level—nor in the vast majority of cities and states across the nation.

But there might be hope that it could be.

On August 23, the Justice Department—together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington-—filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage Inc.

RealPage is an American multinational corporation that provides property management software for the multifamily, commercial, single-family, and vacation rental housing industries. 

According to the Justice Department, the company engaged in an unlawful scheme to:

1. Decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing; and
2. Monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments:

The lawsuit states: “RealPage’s alleged conduct deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans. 

“RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software.

“This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information.”

One city that has rent control and housing protections for tenants is San Francisco.

To hear slumlords tell it, the city is a “renters’ paradise,” where obnoxious, lazy, rent-evading tenants constantly take advantage of hard-working, put-upon landlords.

Don’t believe it.

The power of slumlords calls to mind the scene in 1987’s The Untouchables, where Sean Connery’s veteran cop tells Eliot Ness: “Everybody knows where the liquor is. It’s just a question of: Who wants to cross Capone?”  

Everybody in San Francisco knows who the slumlords are. But the District Attorney’s Office hasn’t criminally prosecuted a slumlord in decades. 

Many tenants have lived with rotting floors, bedbugs, nonworking toilets, mice/rats, chipping lead-based paint and other outrages for not simply months but years. 

Consider the challenges faced by the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection (DBI), which is charged with ensuring that apartment buildings are in habitable condition.  

Under San Francisco law:

• A landlord is automatically given 30 days to correct a health/safety violation. 
• If the landlord claims for any reason that he can’t fix the problem within one month, DBI doesn’t demand that he prove this. Instead, it automatically gives him another month.
• A slumlord has to work at being hit with a fine—by letting a problem go uncorrected for three to six months.
• And even then, repeat slumlord offenders often avoid the fine by pleading for leniency.
• That’s because many DBI officials are themselves landlords.

Consider:

• In 2022, at least 25,000 untested rape kits sat in law enforcement agencies and crime labs across the country. 
• But illegal drug kits are automatically rushed to the had of the line.